in 1862, where, perhaps it is a little surprising that he did not begin in 1836, with an investigation of the physiological mechanism of Thought and Feeling in Man, an investigation which involved a wide range of research into Anatomy, Physiology, Pathology, Insanity, and the Science of Language. The immediate result of this research was the conviction that "Psychology is still without the fundamental data necessary to its constitution as a science-is very much in the condition of chemistry before Lavoisier, or of Biology before Bichat." Perhaps the first impulse of the reader on hearing this confession will be to say that Mr. Lewes has come to grief again; that his investigation of the physiological mechanism of Feeling and Thought begun in 1862 has borne no better fruit than his physiological interpretation of the Scotch Philosophy in 1836, or his investigation of Animal Pyschology in 1860. But a little reflection will suggest that if researches into Physiology at last authorize Mr. Lewes to affirm that Psychology lacks the necessary data for its constitution as a science, it must be that Physiology is in possession of the data itself. If as yet we have no Science of Mind it is for the sufficient reason that we have gone on looking for the data of the science where they are not to be found. From Socrates to the year of grace 1862 Psychologists have been groping among the phenomena of consciousness, its sensations, perceptions, memories, ideas, intuitions, for the wherewithal to interpret consciousness. mind is only a special form of life, and "life" is only our comprehensive abstract term for the functions of an organism. Now functions are determined by structure, and he who would constitute a Science of Biology, or of Psychology, must go for his fundamental data, not to Vitality, or Life, as biologists did before Bichat, or to Mind, as Psychologists did before Mr. Lewes, but to the organism itself, whose various reactions under stimulus on the surrounding universe are what we call in our abstract, comprehensive way, "life," and "mind." This is a momentous discovery on either side of it. If Psychology must draw on Physiology for its data and if Physiology is able to honor the draft; if it be really true that "function" knows how to interpret "structure," or, conversely, that structure has among other functions this one of self-consciousness and self

But

interpretation-then certainly we are on the eve of total revolution in both sciences alike; and in whatever depends upon them, which is nothing less than the conduct of life and the order of society. So far Mr. Lewes is perfectly right in declaring that speculation has been astray for 2,500 years and in affirming his restatement of the problems of life and mind as the "Foundations of a Creed."

It is somewhat surprising to find that a work of this grave intent and long labor bears the evident traces of indecision and precipitation. Not only is the formulation of the new Creed, i. e., the constitution of Psychology on Physiological data, postponed to the future, but the foundation of the creed, which is all that is offered to us here, appears to be no solid structure but only an accumulation of building material drawn from "a huge mass of heterogeneous manuscript," which in turn has grown out of a "varied set of detached investigations "-in Anatomy, Physiology, Pathology, Insanity, and the Science of Language. And the direct purpose of the accumulation is not to lay the foundation of the new Creed but to discredit the metaphysical Method of the old one. This is not a criticism of ours but an explanation of Mr. Lewes's. The work "having grown up heterogeneously, its structure is heterogeneous. Sections now brought together have been wrought out at the distance of years, and without reference to each other," which surely is not heterogeneous structure but none at all; "while during repeated revisions and remodifications many repetitions and cross references have been inserted, and sentences which bear the obvious trace of 1872 or 1873 appear in pages originally written perhaps eight or ten years previously. The reader is also sometimes called upon to accept results for which the evidence can only be produced in subsequent chapters or volumes." The reader will not guess how true this description is until he has made a careful study of the work itself. The Introduction to the whole on the Method of Science and its application to Metaphysics, the first, second, and third problems. on the Limitations of Knowledge, the Principles of Certitude, and the passage from the 'Known to the Unknown, are all variations upon the same theme, what we do not know, what we do know, and how we come to know it; in the Fourth,

Fifth, and Sixth Problems on Matter, Force, Cause, and the Absolute, we make some headway certainly, but even here Mr. Lewes thinks it necessary to remind us incessantly that if the circuit is wider the centre is the same. Moreover this redundancy equally characterizes what may be called the minute structure of the work, section following section and paragraph paragraph in a round of untiring iteration. Now there is a redundancy which is a legitimate and a very high form of art. Descartes for example was a great master of it. The "Discourse on Method" with the accompanying papers, in which he first sketched his system, drew him into correspondence with half the learned men in Europe, and every new criticism elicited a new statement of his ideas. But the new statement never darkened the earlier one; it presented another face of it, or a deeper development of it, or flooded the whole domain. with light from another sun. Mr. Lewes's repetitions are not of this sort. "Wrought out at the distance of years, and without reference to one another," the later sometimes obscure the earlier and sometimes contradict them, so that one needs an exegesis of a very critical character to determine exactly what it is that Mr. Lewes would have us understand. So again there is a reticence which has a strength of emphasis and suggestion better than any speech, but we are constrained to say that Mr. Lewes's reticence is sometimes a suppression of the capital articulations of his thought, and sometimes, as he says himself, the provisional assumption of results for which evidence is to be produced hereafter. Now Mr. Herbert Spencer has made us wary of these "provisional assumptions," for the evidence ultimately assigned for them turns out in many cases to be assumption too; as when assuming the constitution of consciousness we infer the persistence of force, and then assuming the persistence of force we infer the constitution of consciousness. On the whole our conclusion is that the Problems of Life and Mind not only lacks the complete and homogeneous structure requisite to the foundations of a Creed, but the structure Mr. Lewes would himself have given to it in time if some special exigency had not precipitated the publication of the work.

What is this special exigency? It cannot be any threatening

manifestation of fresh vitality and aggressiveness on the part of the Intuitional Philosophy which Mr. Lewes is about to supersede, for in all the storms of its long career that Philosophy has never been so patient as it is to-day under the affronts of Empiricism; and Mr. Lewes at any rate believes it to have said its last word long ago and to be now in the article of death. Platonism, Mysticism, Scholasticism, Idealism, Rationalism, Kantism-all these schools have had their day and finished their work, have built the Creed foundation and superstructure; and whether the work will stand or fall there can be no more need of impatience and haste in disposing of it than of any other historical monument of the past. But what if some other Empiricist is in the field with a Creed which anticipates Mr. Lewes's, or which denies it and so compromises the whole philosophy and faith of the future? Then we can understand that both for his own sake and for the sake of truth and of humanity, it would be necessary for him to go upon record at once whether ready or not; not only to organize the coming revolution, which might be a work of leisure, but to protect it from the blunders of other revolutionists, which is a work of urgency. "Is it not a justifiable hope, says Mr. Lewes, that England may some day possess a philosophy, the absence of which during the last two hundred years has been a serious defect in her culture? Science she has had, and Poetry, and Literature, rivalling when not surpassing those of other nations. But a Philosophy she has not had, in spite of philosophic thinkers of epoch-making power. . There has been

no noteworthy attempt to give a conception of the World, of Man, and of Society, wrought out with an effort to systematise the scattered labors of isolated thinkers. Mr. Herbert Spencer is now for the first time deliberately making the attempt to found a Philosophy"* (i. e., is the first to make the attempt). Why not leave the enterprise then in the hands of Mr. Herbert Spencer? There seems to be only one satisfactory answer to this question. Mr. Spencer is doing what Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, English thinkers of epoch-making power never thought of, what Kepler and Galileo, Descartes and

*i, p. 84.

Bacon began but did not complete; he is founding a Universal Creed for the future, a "Positive Philosophy to embrace the World, Man, and Society on one homogeneous Method;"* but in the opinion of Mr. Lewes he is not founding it well, and his errors are of such capital importance that prompt denial and rectification of them is demanded in the interest of Empiricism and of posterity.

At any rate whatever the motive of the work, whether cooperation with Mr. Spencer, or correction of his errors, or independent investigation, there can be no doubt of the fact that the Problems of Life and Mind, starting from the common Empirical doctrine concerning the sources and limits of human knowledge is either a point-blank denial or a radical modification of every important principle, one excepted, which Mr Spencer has drawn from that doctrine. In the entire range of the Intuitional Philosophy from Plato to Kant there is not an instance of deeper dissent and sharper contradiction than between our two Empiricists; and it is only in the light of this dissent from Mr. Spencer that we can understand Mr. Lewes's dissent from the Intuitional Philosophy, and the real character of the Creed he proposes to found.

All thorough-going philosophy begins with a single cognition and a provisional skepticism concerning everything else. What I know with instant and absolute certitude is this, that I am. To this I immediately add the affirmation, that I have been; an immense addition—so immense that it really contains all the materials on which I am going to philosophize;† and so wholly different from the first affirmation ("I am") that it requires to be protected against my provisional skepticism. In common with all others of his school Mr. Spencer escapes the brunt of the battle by taking the certitude and the assumption together as of equal validity, and so secures as the basis of his philosophy the entire contents of consciousness, the feelings we have in the present and the feelings we remember to have had in the past. His method of treating the materials is the empirical-analysis and classification, the decomposition of the comi, p. 86.

Since present experience becomes memory in the act of philosophizing upon it.